Lev Lafayette's journal

Every year I do a series of invited lectures and assessment for the UniMelb master's-level course "Cluster and Cloud Computing", which is a rather massive course with approximately four hundred students primarily from computer science and data science. Anyway, this has started for 2025 and will continue for the next few weeks. In between all this I have two advanced researcher workshops next week on "Parallel Processing" (shell commands, job arrays, OpenMP and OpenMPI programming), and "Mathematical Programming" (R, Octave/MATLAB, Julia, Maxima, Stata, etc). Further, I recently gave a presentation to the Spartan Champions group on scheduler-level parallelisation. In most cases this is the easiest way to do a type of parallel data computation and, as such, makes a low-hanging opportunity for making the best use of computing resources. Finally, on a slightly related matter, I have put up a script (called "lament") designed for local viewing of Facebook encrypted messages, converting the JSON to HTML conversion of Facebook Messenger files using the Pandas and JSON extensions for Python.

I have had the pleasure of catching up with interstate visitors this week! Firstly, I had the delight to catch up with Justine, Simon, Erica, and Susie C., for brunch with "Le Cafe Flo, a rather good French cafe in Thornbury. It was conveniently located to "The Witches Wardrobe Flea Market", which had a good variety of goth, emo, etc. wares. It was a bit of a Perth migrants day for our part, enhanced with visitor Susie C., who is making a lot of noises about making the trip across the Nullabor on a more permanent basis. Another visitor this week is my dear friend (and co-owner of property) from Darwin, Lara D. Lara is blessing me with two weeks with her company, and we have quite the range of artistic, musical, and culinary delights lined up, although it will be hard for the latter to beat the dinner provided by Carol D., Lara's mother, last night.

The nominal reason for the visit to Perth was to attend the Australia-China Friendship Society National Conference. This year is the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the People's Republic of China and Australia, an entirely pragmatic decision; it really didn't make sense to recognise the Republic of China with a total area of 36K km^2 and a population of 15.5M (1972) over the PRC with 9.6M km2 and 862M. At the time, then opposition leader Gough Whitlam visited the PRC in 1971 and announced impending recognition upon election; conservatives were aghast that Labor would lead Australia to recognise "Red China", as it was called by the media in those days. They were suddenly a lot less vocal when Nixon announced his impending visit several days later. Today, the PRC makes up 43% of Australia's exports by value, almost four times greater than any other single national market (Japan comes in second at 11%) and is the largest import country as well, at 29%. Despite the occasional sabre-rattling, it probably should also be noted that the PRC is the largest import and export partner for the RoC.

The conference opened on Friday night with a small (c50 people) but impressive dinner at Hotel Northbridge and a pretty decent address by Stuart Crockett, the former West Australia Trade Commissioner to China. The main day of conference proceedings was attended by over 200 people, and it was one of those occasions when everyone in the room was quite notable. Even the photographer I was chatting with turned out to be recently returned from Ukraine as his "day job" is a war photographer. There was a truly impressive Welcome to Country by Barry Winmar (and I surprised myself by how much Noongar language I could recall), there was an address by the Premier of WA, Mark McGowan (I managed to get a brief conversation in), the PRC ambassador to Australia, Xiao Chan, and Professor and Nobel Laureate Barry Marshall - we really bounced off with each other well. Later I encountered a children's author, Frances Maber, who I used to know from Murdoch University days over 30 years ago.

That evening was the gala dinner for the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations, attended by over 500 people with opera and soprano singers, and some rather superb dining. The State MP for South Perth, Geoff Baker, gave an address; this is particularly notable as it we went to the same nightclubs again about 30 years ago. As we were chatting one of the waiting staff turned up: "Lev! I haven't seen you for years" - it was Peter J., who I also haven't seen for a similar period of time. My poor brain thought I'd stepped into a Twilight Zone version of "This Is Your Life". Finally, the following day, there was a short Annual General Meeting of the Society where outgoing president Robin Matthews run the show like clockwork and Anthony Leong gave an address on Chinese representation in the Australian media - which interestingly included a great deal of what he described in his presentation to the Isocracy Annual General Meeting earlier this year. All in all, there was a sense of relief and cautious optimism among all attendees that the new Federal government would be at least sane and realistic in its dealings with the PRC and certainly, Simon Wu, the WA branch, and the numerous volunteers deserve accolades for running such an excellent conference.

Every week there are one or two new research papers released that used the UniMelb supercomputer that I work on. This week's really caught my attention; "The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on air pollution: A global assessment using machine learning techniques" published in Atmospheric Pollution Research. If there was a benefit of the pandemic (and they are few), one was the opportunity to quantify human activities on air quality; so modeling the effects in 700 (!) cities, they found that clean transport strategies in China and India would have the highest potential health benefit; whether or not anything happens will, of course, depend on public policy which is always a challenge. Today we managed to bring (almost) everyone into the office for a morning meeting summarising many of the utilisation and technology improvements we've had over the past year in high performance computing and use of the research cloud. I am increasingly of the opinion that given how broken our political economy is, which rewards the personality traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, the main vector to generating any improvements in people's wealth and well-being is select technologies.

Speaking of which, I am visiting Perth after an absence of over two years! I'll be departing on Thursday 9 June and returning Tuesday 14th June and dear West Australians, yes I will be arranging for another of my famous visiting dinners at some cheap and cheerful Italian restaurant, as is my habit on Sunday 12th. To say that I have missed the immediate company of my Perth friends over the past two years is quite an understatement. Despite being a Melbourne person for more than half my life now, the importance of those I associated with in those heady and exciting years and their development in the decades that followed is a critical part of my life. Of course, I haven't planned accommodation yet, but I do know that over the weekend I'll be meeting a couple of senior politicians, people from a certain embassy, and visiting a manufacturing plant. All of which is sufficiently ambiguous at this point, but I think I'll be able to reveal a lot more publically within the next fortnight or so.

There is now only sixteen days before the Australian Federal election, which has been relatively quiet. I suspect from this point onwards however campaigns are going to go ballistic. Whilst the cost of living is increasingly becoming the single most important issue, it is important to realise that a major driver of this issue is the direction of public monies. Monetary theory teaches us that a government in charge of its own money supply can basically create money ex nihilo (fun fact: taxes don't fund federal government expenditure like the NDIS, etc) and the real limiting factor is whether productivity gains equal the increase in the money supply. Which, apart from the sheer disgust at nepotistic behaviour, events like Aspen Medical receiving more than $1 billion in government PPE contracts despite their lack of large-scale procurement experience (but well connected to former LNP health minister Michael Wooldridge and current LNP minister Greg Hunt). It just horrifies me, and I believe this should be a sackable offense. Clearly, some people just don't care about good and careful stewardship of public monies, and it stands as another reason why we need a Federal Independent Commission Against Corruption. There are simply too many examples of very questionable behaviour.

I've returned from a journey to The Western Lands, as I used to call WA in reference to William S. Burroughs. There are some similarities, of course, Perth being this oasis-like dot among the deserts of WA, although it is perhaps a little unfair to compare to the ancient Egyptian Land of the Dead. It was certainly anything but during my brief visit, although most of that was taken up by attending the HPC-AI Advisory Council conference. Particularly impressed with the scope of work that DK Panda is carrying out for MVAPICH2, and especially in making MPI aware of GPUs; could be quite handy. My own presentation on the International HPC Certification Forum was an elaboration to the one given at the ARDC summit a month prior, and seem to go across reasonably well. Hopefully, I'll get a few more people involved in the project and contributing. The visit to the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre was quite enjoyable as well; they have been strong backers of the project.

A particular highlight of the trip was dinner on Wednesday night at Bistro Bellavista in East Perth, my old stomping ground in that somewhat troubled 17th year of my life. Despite my appallingly short notice (I started contacting people on Sunday night!), and the fact that a few people slipped off the list altogether, some 20+ people still found it worthwhile to come out for the dinner, including some individuals whom I literally hadn't seen for decades. In addition to this, caught up with Arnold and Cathy H on my first night in Fremantle who were also quite remarkable in accepting my late notice, and treated me to an impressive Thai meal. In both cases, they were nights of good company, good cheer, good food, and quality conversation.

The final day in Perth was a trip out to the Australian Resources Research Centre (ARRC) to attend a GPU programming workshop organised by the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre. The workshop led by Rob Faber, an author on OpenACC and CUDA, and the workshop provided plenty of good examples to work with (and which credited permission was granted to use in my own training). On my return to Perth, wrote an extensive report on the conference for work, including a few items of importance concerning industry some trends that I picked up on the grapevine. Immediate tasks will involve however more optimising on our installs of MVAPICH2, building more Singularity containers, and working on an advanced GPU programming course. I think next week I'll be off to Canberra for the Challenges in High Performance Computing conference in Canberra, where I have a paper on some of the mathematical problems in HPC.

Last Friday I attended a pleasant gathering at The Black Cat, quite a Melbourne icon of some Perth visitors, hosted by Jason M. and Megan M., which involved quite a collection of recent and old Perth migrants (and others), some of whom I hadn't seen for literally decades. Yet despite the animated conversation and good spirits, there was a sombre mood in the background as we inevitably reflected on the events in Christchurch that day. There is a great deal of distaste left in my mouth witnessing numerous politicians, including the Australian Prime Minister, who have vilified Muslims for years and then expressed horror when an extremist massacres people of said faith. For one Sky News reporter, who had lived a double-life for too long, this was a time to leave. I try to be sensitive to personal contexts and not to elevate them (as even good media is want to do), but I do have a heightened visceral reaction to this. As many readers will know, the South Island is a special place for me, and home is where the heart is.

Life, however, goes on for the living and even mine as I try to pack more in a couple of lives in my allocated time. The following day would have been my 1,000th day-streak on Duolingo - and I forgot with the last leaf for the day as I was distracted by macroeconomics of all things. Thank goodness for the streak-freeze. As it turns out I've taken to writing short essays as I'm working my way through my economics courses, looking at market concentration in various industries, monetary policy and money, and - coming soon - the ideal size of government. Another area of interest is in the next couple of days I'll be taking the course to become a credited Software Carpentry instructor, something that's been on my bucket-list for five years. Unfortunately, the classes are in the U.S. and I'll have to attend by video-conferencing and do so from 3 am in the morning to 11 am. Nevertheless it was too good an opportunity to miss out on, and a couple of days working ridiculous hours will just be the price I have to pay.

Ran Eclipse Phase on Sunday with the PCs now in the role of Proxies managing a team of Sentinels. Dealing with a direct existential risk one group decided to enhance an existing intra-Transhuman conflict rather than take a peaceful but even more dangerous option. Another Proxy has the interesting task of receiving two jobs from competing factions, one to kidnap a group and the other to prevent it. The other Proxy has the issue of having to extract information from the equivalent of a minister of internal security. It's all quite challenging and as yet unresolved, but in terms of rising tension, there's plenty of that. Afterwards, there was a committee meeting of the RPG Review Cooperative which went well, following by dinner with nephew Luke. I took the opportunity to introduce to some material of Radio Birdman and, in somewhat related news, have discovered that one of the main people behind the musical act New Waver works in the same building as me. I was quite a fan of what they were doing in the late 1990s, so the opportunity to meet up is tempting.

Managed to catch up with lunch (Fremantle) and dinner (Perth) on the 28th with a number of old friends, including darklion, strangedave, thefon, ariaflame, fred_mouse, grailchaser, Murray W., Andrei N., Bruce T., Jason F., and Michael J., Brian G, (and I'm sure I've missed someone...). The gathering was at two Italian restaurants which meant good food and in the latter case allowed me to attempt a few mangled phrases in their native tongue. The day also saw the collection of the last boxes and history of the MARS library for the RPG Review Cooperative, another 60kg of games. The last day in Perth included a visit to the Fremantle cemetery for the solemn moment to inurn Maria H's ashes. The last two days back at home have been spent formatting Supercomputing with Linux for the printers.

New Year's Evening was a quiet one at home, with a clink of glasses at midnight and that's about it. Inevitably the New Year brings into reflections of the ever-optimistic plans of the previous year. Whilst my natural tendency is to beat myself up over not achieving everything on the list, I should feel some degree of satisfaction with completing a good portion and few other things besides. After all the year has seen my get two books in production, including "a thirty-year joke" in Papers & Paychecks, attending no less than eight conferences (and presented at half at them), many international and interstate trips (finally I visit Paris), and some modest improvements in the various associations that I have responsibility for. Attending three funerals and having a friend develop rapid dementia were significant challenges in the year. As I get older it is inevitable this will be more common. I will, of course, engage in a more thorough review of 2017 and plans for 2018 in the next few days, but already I am planning not to do so much new, rather complete outstanding items.

The past couple of days have been dealing primarily with the Spartan upgrade. It was a massive change, involving switch upgrades and reconfiguration, driver and kernel upgrades, including iDrac, OFED, NVidia upgrades, Puppet reconfigurations, new storage filesystem for home and project directories, synching those directories (the slowest and most terrifying part really), a new upgrade to Slurm, new partitions, and an upgrade to the Nova OpenStack provisioning. To be fair, I had a fairly minimal role in all this (much of my time was dealing with the sync and taking the opportunity to update course material and Supercomputing with Linux), but it all went smoothly, and surprisingly according to timetable. This all puts up back in line for more work in the remaining of the week for the GPGPU partition.

The weekend was busy enough as well, with our irregular Cheesequest (white stilton, blue stilton, dutch smoked, vegan brie) with ser_pounce and hathhalla visiting the asylum. It was also opportune to crack open a long-forgotten bottle of Pierre Naigeon beaujolais from 2008 which hadn't aged badly at all. After that it was a session of Dungeons & Dragons with Charlemagne's paladins dealing with rebellious Saxons and a werewolf monk. That night we went to The Astor to catch up with funontheupfield and Marie to see Star Wars: The Last Jedi. It was good without being great, on par with The Force Awakens. I admit I'm looking forward to the end of this series however. Apart form Kylo Ren's character being annoyingly petulant rather than threatening, it would be good to tie-up the mysticism of The Force. Indeed, if you want the rebels to win democraticise The Force. Curiously Sunday's RuneQuest game (assault against evil sorcerers) seemed somewhat apt.

Preparations are underway for a one-week end-of-year visit to Perth; tickets booked, Secret Santa stuff organised (for goodness sake Australia Post, hurry up with those deliveries, I ordered them weeks ago), the cat has a home in the duration courtesy of NinjaDan, and the other animals will make do. It'll be my third visit this year to The Western Lands, which is somewhat above the usual rate that I'm used to, although this year did have special circumstances. It's curious has many connections I still have with the place that I left some twenty-five years ago for the final time. I don't particularly like Perth aesthetically; the relentless heat, isolation, and suburbia is not really to my taste. But I have been fortunate to know so many good people over there. I'd better get a move on with arranging something.

With an extended stay of three more days I've mostly been working remotely in hours that are not terribly out-of-sync with the rest of the team. Nevertheless, the extra time in Western Australia has afforded me the opportunity to catch up with a number of other people. The stay in the newly renvoated home of doctor_k_ and strangedave has been great, and I've had the opportunity to explore a bit of the Mount Hawthorn region which I lived in a for a while way back in 1986. It also has been the opportunity to catch up with several other Murdoch people from that era. Yesterday, I had a late lunch with Fabian U., and former Senator Brian G.. Apart from reminiscing on past times, a portion of the conversation turned to real estate. Fabian was looking for a place to purchase for his son, whereas Brian had worked for many years in the Real Estate Industry of WA. My own contributions to that discussion were mostly on the virtues of land tax and the problems of negative gearing. Afterwards, on a whim, Fabian and I went down to Fremantle to end the day. Fremantle is the harbour side town to Perth the city, and is a much more beautiful and welcoming place with its Victorian-era limestone buildings. We had a great chat about the relationship with deep learning and language. Likewise, the previous day I had caught up with another former Murdoch University colleague, Murray W., and discussed matters such as the state of various RPG clubs in comparison between Victoria and WA, and especially the political landscape, both on an Australian scale and with international comparisons.

Although there is not much that draws me to Perth in terms of style or culture, there are many old friends and memories here. In that regard, this has been quite a great trip. Apart from the aforementioned I have had the great opportunity to catch up with many and have spent extended time in the company of Bruce T., and thefon, Andrei N., and Arnold H., in particular. The journey hasn't really caused any great loss in productivity either, as I've been able to beaver away on various projects in early mornings and evenings, in addition to the time spent at the HPC Advisory Council conference. I am rather looking forward however to getting home to normal life back in Melbourne with caseopaya and Mac the Cat. Nevertheless, there is one most important thing to do here - and that's attend Erica W.'s funeral - and with Lachlan S.,'s on Monday, one can tell in advance what my next journal entry will be.

"Fiery the angels fell; deep thunder rolled around their shores; burning with the fires of Orc"

Yesterday I was informed that an old friend and former housemate in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Erica W., had died of a stroke. For those that knew her, this has been a terrible shock. She was relatively young, and seemed so alive, and seemed to have so much to contribute to this world. It is a harsh reminder that friends can be lost at any time with the randomness of life.

When I first met her she and her partner at the time, James, were in their mid-teens. Intelligent, attractive, highly alternative, and very fashionable, they were already living together and regularly visiting local nightclubs, where they were very well-regarded for the characteristics mentioned. There was an especially amusing moment when a local newspaper printed her in a vox-pop what her preferred nightclub was - and mentioned her age in the credit.

"Morphology, longevity, incept dates"

Whilst in Perth we shared two households at different times - the first was the famous "accelerated house", a dilapidated duplex pair with questionable plumbing. Part of the duplex was the home of the Accelerated Men, a goth band of some repute. The place was wired up a local area network with a AlphaMicro AM-100, and came with its own stray cat (Velocity) which I adopted. Several years later, at the final place where I lived in Perth, we were in more normal accommodation. I could help but chuckle a little at my highly fashion-conscious housemates who could spend hours in preparation on going out. I also remember showing them the Internet at the time; a text-based interface to usenet groups. "This", I implored sagaciously, "is going to change everything". I don't think they quite believed me at the time, so it was with great fondness catching up with James just a couple of years ago, and recalling that moment, he said: "And you were right!".

At the time Erica was suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, and despite being a witty conversationalist, was physically in the doldrums. A few years later however, and I suspect heavily because of the direction provided by our mutual friend Bruce T., there had been a complete change, as she had become quite a figure in the fashion industry and was running her own label and store, Alysian Empire. I still have some of their clothes to this day. Later she would go on to have another fashion label of even greater renown, ericaamerica.

In the post-Alysian Empire period we only caught up in person a couple of times, and more recently exchanged a few messages, courtesy of the 'borg of social media. Despite this we had the sort of friendship where years could literally go by and when we did get in contact our banter could continue as if no time had passed at all. It was a friendship built on mutual understanding and respect, of affirmation of each other, of strong and happy shared memories. The mention of her name in conversation would always brighten my day and bring me joy; but not this time.

"Tyrell had told me Rachael was special: no termination date. I didn't know how long we had together. Who does?"

Arrived in Perth for a flying festive season visit with caseopaya with Perth's temperatures soaring as is increasingly often the case to 42 degrees C. On arrival found out that there was a funeral service to attend for one Alf Graf, a hydralics engineer. I never knew him, but was a friend of caseopaya's family. One could not help but be impressed by the genuine sense of loss among those assembled. He was clearly a person of importance to his family and friends with almost three hundred in attendance with the obituaries mentioning in particular his good humour and generosity.

Yesterday was two big social events just in time for the summer solstice. Lunch was at Ruocco's Pizzeria E Ristorante in Fremantle with several lovely friends, including the ever-animated Grant Stone, Andrei Nikulinsky and stephen_dedman. Dinner, with about twice as many visitors, was at Amore Mio (FB) in Maylands with darklion, ariaflame, strangedave, and thefon in attendance among others. Both events were indeed notable for the fine food and great conversation over a range of topics.

Following morning we were at thefon's place trawling through the records of the Murdoch Alternative Reality Society, a club I formed in 1988. From what I can tell it operated until 2009, just making it into its 21st year but alas could not be revived from there. As well as the records there was also a substantial library, much of it science fiction and fantasy books which are not really worth shipping back to Melbourne. The roleplaying games however are, and a good portion of them will be merged into a semi-successor organisation, the RPG Review Cooperative. On that note, the next issue of RPG Review is going along very well, and as many would have already noticed, we easily made our Kickstarter for Papers & Paychecks. A very good way to end the year.